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Imagining the Future History of Climate Change
HughPickens.com writes "The NYT reports that Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, is attracting wide notice these days for a work of science fiction called "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future," that takes the point of view of a historian in 2393 explaining how "the Great Collapse of 2093" occurred. "Without spoiling the story," Oreskes said in an interview, "I can tell you that a lot of what happens — floods, droughts, mass migrations, the end of humanity in Africa and Australia — is the result of inaction to very clear warnings" about climate change caused by humans." Dramatizing the science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, the book reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called "carbon combustion complex" that have turned the practice of science into political fodder.
Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the "95 percent confidence limit" is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening. "Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."
Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would target scientists too, says Oreskes. "If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it's always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed," Oreskes says. "So we felt that we had to say something about scientists.""
Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the "95 percent confidence limit" is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening. "Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."
Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would target scientists too, says Oreskes. "If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it's always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed," Oreskes says. "So we felt that we had to say something about scientists.""
I'm old enough to remember them saying that the worlds rainforests would be gone by 2010. That the water would be so polluted by 2000 that we wouldn't have anything to drink. That north america would be a desert by 2012, and southern canada would be semi-tropical by 2015. Fear mongering is the way money grubbers make money.
Oh, and those predictions? They came out while I was in grade school...in the 1980's, still got the pamphlets and handouts somewhere for them.
Om, nomnomnom...
>> work of science fiction called "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future," that takes the point of view of a historian in 2393 explaining how "the Great Collapse of 2093" occurred
As a guy who's read scifi for 30 years, this sounds as boring as fuck. Hundreds of writers have written civ collapses into the backdrop of their story and many of these have been manmade ecological disasters. But then the good writers write a story, populating the post-event world with people whose lives and relationships riff off the tragedy of the fall and the sense of current loss.
As worded, this sounds more like the background notes for a role-playing game set in the future, after an ecological collapse....zzzzzZZZZZ.
The mass (near) extinction of humans need not be noticeable. All that is required is that the environment become inhospitable enough to humans to cause the birth:death ratio to drop below 1. Given that currently everyone still dies, this simply means that people stop producing at least 1 child per parent (e.g. 2 kids per hetero-normative couple) that survives and produces more children.
This could mean people start dying of disease and famine due to global warming. Or it could just mean that people decide not to have as many children because it decreases their quality of life. When the earth had lots of easily accessible natural resources, making lots of children was a good strategy. Maybe when you can barely find enough food for yourself, you might choose to have only 1 kid instead of 2.
The "near extinction" (i.e. drastic lowering of human population), need not involve any significant amount of suffering (not more than we have today anyway), and it may not even need to be noticeable without statistical analysis. If this decline happens over thousands or tens of thousands of years, it will not be noticeable over the course of a human lifetime. Failing to notice a 0.1% drop in population over your lifetime will be like failing to notice a 0.1 degree increase in average temperature over your lifetime.
In fact, if you believe overpopulation is a big problem, this kind of gradual decrease in human population may even be considered a good thing until our survival as a species begins to be threatened by it.
I suspect something far more normal will happen. We will simply hit an equilibrium point, where the world is just hospitable enough to cause humans to have about a 1:1 birth:death ratio, with some fluctuations. Technology may even raise this equilibrium point well above the 7 billion people we have now.
What gets me is the mild warming we are obviously going to be experiencing (since large CO2 increase have not shown not to correlate to rapid temperature increases as previously thought) is going to bring an overall boon to the planet, just as it did in ages past - a wider range of arable land.
Sure some land will change for the worse, but overall as a species we will be better off - and the rate the climate is changing allows for plenty of time for people, plants and animals to adapt.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage. At the very worst bad weather has caused localized destruction that is, in every single case, completely recovered within a decade. "
You're hilariously wrong on this point. I'll grant you that it may depend on your scope and scale, but I trust you're aware that the Middle East used to be referred to as the "Fertile Crescent." What happened? Climate changed. It's theorized that the Mongols were able to cross the Asian steppes in the first place because significant rainfall patterns over several years greened the countryside enough to support a large foraging army as it traveled. And history is full -- literally *full* of examples of kingdoms toppled, countries overthrown, and civil unrest and destruction as a result of climate changes.
1770 Benghal: Famine kills 10 million people. Cause? Drought. One third of the population dead. Recovered in ten years? Not bloody likely.
1630-1631: Famine kills two million in China. Repeated drought-related disasters feed unrest and lead to the collapse of the entire Ming Dynasty in 1644.
1844-1849: Great Irish Potato Famine. Kills over one milion Irish, leads to the emigration of 1.5-2 million more. Irish demographics permanently shifted as a result, Irish populations seeded in other countries including a significant population in America.
1972-1973: Famine in Ethiopia kills 60,000 people, leads to the downfall of King Haile Selassie. Clearly this is a non-issue today, because Ethiopia is now a lush land of plenty and abundance.
1816-1817: Year Without A Summer: Has a huge number of impacts on innovation and culture, as well as killing several hundreds thousand more people worldwide. Wikipedia has the full list of interesting details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y...
So, no, you're just wrong about this. Multi-year weather patterns and long-term climate shifts have killed tens of millions of people throughout history. Famine and drought have toppled nations, destroyed city-states, and crushed empires. In some cases, the economic impacts of these events continue to reverberate in modern history.
Change = change = change
Those events you listed are small scale in comparison to the long-term trend we're setting ourselves up for. Even the empire-crushing changes of the past will look miniscule compared to what we're likely to see from 2080 onward.
A good book to read on the subject is "Under A Green Sky" by Peter Ward. It gives the reader a good feel for the scale of the changes that take place between major epochs.